Marketo tip #18 - Personalize emails with automatic gender detection

Hi guys, I hope you are more or less well. This morning, we'll talk about email personalisation, which is crucial in marketing and, more precisely, how we get the data to personalise those emails and have good data quality. The example will be the gender here and I will show you that in Marketo and Salesforce. I'm Sylvain Davril, founder of Merlin/Leonard, and this is a new Marketo tip. Let's take this example of a French email I sent last week. There's this blog here. In French, it translates to 'Demo live this morning, interested?' but the problem is that, in French, this word 'intéressé' would be different. If I'm talking to a man compared to talking to a woman this would (show as a) 'he' for a woman here. So first disclaimer, I know there's debate on gender diversity - who is a man, who is a woman - but let's set that apart and just imagine we are in a more simple world like, maybe, 20 or 30 years ago where we had only two genders and we could apply that in the email, right, for the sake of marketing automation. So here I could apply in Marketo a segmentation. I would make this block dynamic here and I would choose this segmentation I prepared beforehand based on the gender and also based on the fact that I addressed this person with a 'tu' or a 'vous'. You know, in French, we have two ways to address someone, whether we know this person very well or not, and it gives four combinations in the end on how we can address a person. So here I will apply this segmentation and I see the four values here. Marketo will create four variations of this block where I could put the exact text for a man addressed with 'vous', a man addressed with a 'tu', a woman addressed with a 'vous' and a woman addressed with 'tu'. And here I would have exactly a perfectly personalised email. Marketo will, before sending this email, look at everybody in the database segment, the audience, and send the right variation of this block to the right people. How does that segmentation work? It's in the database part. Here I've prepared the segmentation. I have my four different values plus a default value, but basically the values are a smart list. It's very easy to do in Marketo. The smart list will be based on two fields that I have in my database, the standard field salutation that is synced with my CRM and this custom field ('tutoiement'), which also is synced with my CRM, and I will have that on my contact page and lead page. Here, this is information I will have to input manually because there's only me who knows if I address this person with a 'tu' or a 'vous', which, in the service industry I think is very important because it would be weird if I'm talking in an email in the 'vous' form compared in the real life with the 'tu' form to someone. It introduces a discrepancy here. I don't want that. For the gender, I will use this salutation field, but I don't always think about putting the right value in this field when I create the person. So I've created this campaign in Marketo where Marketo will look at all the people who are created, whether it's in the CRM or in Marketo, or when the first name changes and the salutation is empty. Here it will change the value of the salutation based on this list of male first names I put together and email first names I put together. So those lists have been put together with a public list I found on data.gov.fr for France, for instance. There are plenty of first names available. Regularly, I come to this campaign and I have a look at all the people. This campaign could not enrich automatically, meaning that their first name is not listed here and I will regularly update my list here. Obviously, it will not work for the first name that may be for men and women. In French, we have, for instance, Dominique, which can be a man or a woman; I cannot say. So here I will have to input that manually in my CRM or in Marketo, but it works great for 90% of the cases. So it gives me structured data with very good data quality that I can use in my email. It can be the same for, for instance, the service, whether a person working in sales, marketing, management, purchasing department, based on the job title. So whether some keywords are listed 'present' in the job title, we can say then that the person's service is marketing, sales, and so forth and so on. Also, for instance, the decision level can be decided thanks to some keywords in the job title. So this is a way, a very easy way to turn unstructured data text fields into structured and high-quality data that you can then use in your email that you want to personalise. So if you want some help, don't hesitate; we're here for that. Talk to you soon for the next Marketo tip. Bye guys.